MATLAB Programming Contest Blog

December 1st, 2006

Security Holes Patched Up

Hannes Naudé took advantage of a funky feature of MATLAB’s REGEXP in order to sneak a command by our security. Dynamic regular expressions allow you to execute MATLAB commands from within a regular expression, an unusual feature that’s been useful to me in the past when doing replacements. Embarrassingly, we weren’t even trying to block CLEAR because it didn’t matter in past contests. REGEXP and CLEAR are now blocked. No real damage to the contest was done and we’re still on-track to award a Midnight Madness prize tonight to the best-scoring entry submitted before midnight EST.

By Matthew Simoneau

18:31 UTC | Posted in Blackbox | Permalink |

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One Response to “Security Holes Patched Up”

  1. Rakeshsharma replied on May 10th, 2007 at 00:34 UTC :

    It is fun to participate in the Matlab programming contest

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The MATLAB Programming Contest is a semi-annual competition where contestants submit MATLAB code to try to solve a challenge. For more information, see the overview.

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